Abstract
The Information Service (IS) is an integral part of the Trigger and Data Acquisition (TDAQ) system of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The IS allows online publication of operational monitoring data, and it is used by all sub-systems and sub-detectors of the experiment to constantly monitor their hardware and software components including more than 25000 applications running on more than 3000 computers. The Persistent Back-End for the ATLAS Information System (PBEAST) service stores all raw operational monitoring data for the lifetime of the experiment and provides programming and graphical interfaces to access them including Grafana dashboards and notebooks based on the CERN SWAN platform. During the ATLAS data taking sessions (for the full LHC Run 2 period) PBEAST acquired data at an average information update rate of 200 kHz and stored 20 TB of highly compacted and compressed data per year. This paper reports how over six years PBEAST became an essential piece of the experiment operations including details of the challenging requirements, the failures and successes of the various attempted implementations, the new types of monitoring data and the results of the time-series database technology evaluations for the improvements towards LHC Run 3.
Highlights
The ATLAS experiment [1] at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN uses more than a hundred million electronic channels to record the data produced by the collisions
At the beginning of LHC Run 1, it was suggested by the Trigger and Data Acquisition system (TDAQ) Controls and Configuration group to create a common Information Service (IS) persistence named Persistent Back-End for the ATLAS Information System (PBEAST) (Persistent Back-End for the ATLAS information System of TDAQ)
PBEAST was successfully used during LHC Run 2 and is planned to be used in Run 3 without major software changes
Summary
The ATLAS experiment [1] at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN uses more than a hundred million electronic channels to record the data produced by the collisions. They are configured, controlled and monitored by more than 25000 online applications running on more than 3000 computers. Every application produces some operational monitoring data. About 200000 monitoring values are updated per second during data taking runs. The ATLAS operational monitoring uses the Information Service (IS) [2] introduced more than 20 years ago by the Trigger and Data Acquisition system (TDAQ) [3]. At the beginning of LHC Run 1, it was suggested by the TDAQ Controls and Configuration group to create a common IS persistence named PBEAST (Persistent Back-End for the ATLAS information System of TDAQ). The PBEAST has to archive, aggregate and visualise raw ATLAS operational data in a generic way
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